2023-06-23 13:07:00
The wreckage of the “Titan” was found. The capsule did not fill up and sank. And she wasn’t crushed either. The water below ripped the capsule apart in milliseconds. It was a quick and painless death.
According to John Mauger, Rear Admiral of the US Coast Guard, the “Titan” was lost in a “catastrophic implosion of the ship”, as indicated by the debris field. But what is an implosion? An implosion is the “opposite” of an explosion. Explosions are known. Here, a substance in the center expands very quickly and violently, creating pressure. Often this happens when a solid – the explosive – is caused to change to a gaseous state very quickly. Then it gains volume, expands and blasts away a shell around it. That’s how a bomb works.
The opposite occurs in an implosion. In the center there is no overpressure, but a negative pressure or a vacuum. Just like on board the “Titan”. Inside there is a pressure like on the surface. On board a ship, above the waves, there is therefore no risk of implosion. The same pressure conditions prevail inside and outside. If the submersible now goes into the depths of the sea, the pressure difference between the outside (water) and the inside (air) increases more and more. Actually, the pressure would crush the interior. If the sub were a rubber ball, the same thing would happen, the deeper the ball was dragged down, the more the air inside it would be compressed until it was compressed into a disk.
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“Titan”: Always a precarious situation
The pressure hull prevents this on every submarine. It is built so stably that it resists the water pressure. The deeper you want, the more stable the capsule has to be. Figuratively speaking, at a depth of 4000 meters, a water column 4 kilometers high presses on the capsule. That is why larger submarines with much larger pressure hulls, such as those used by the military, cannot be used at such depths. Incidentally, the problem does not exist with a diving drone because there is no air bubble inside.
Summary: At a depth of almost 4000 meters there is always a precarious situation. Outside the tremendous water pressure, inside pressure like on the surface and in between the pressure hull. It does not consist of one piece, but of several segments, with screw connections, seals and the like.
Only the cell braces itself against the pressure
How does an implosion happen? What is certain is that some component of the pressure hull could not withstand the load. One can only speculate about the question of which one, one will probably never find out. If a part gives way, a seal, a bolt, a crack in the porthole, the entire structure of the cell collapses – because the loss of parts of even a small system has a massive impact on the durability of the entire cell.
A pane of glass that you can stand on also loses its stability if even a small crack forms. What’s more, the cell isn’t just steel, but titanium and carbon-reinforced plastic, a hard, brittle material that breaks, not bends.
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One thing that doesn’t happen at this depth is that water trickles or bubbles through a crack like a faucet, even if disaster films like to show it that way. Due to the pressure, a small crack cannot stabilize, it will immediately enlarge and the whole cell collapses. That’s the implosion. The water penetrates at 1000 km/h – nothing can withstand this violence. This violence is so great that the cell is not crushed, it is shredded. As with an explosion from the outside, the components are accelerated towards each other. Then they collide and push outward again – as if an explosion had taken place. However, the water quickly slows the debris down. This explains the pattern of the debris field. The parts of the “Titan” are scattered on the ground a few hundred meters in front of the “Titanic”.
From implosion to explosion
This change from implosion to explosion also occurs in the reverse direction with bombs. In the case of heavy air mines or atomic bombs, a pressure wave of hot gas first shoots out from the center, the explosion. This creates a tremendous negative pressure in the center, so that after moving outwards (explosion), a wide pressure wave rolls back again (implosion). So-called vacuum bombs are optimized for this purpose.
In the case of the Titan, it can be assumed that the occupants did not notice anything and died the moment the radio connection was lost. Had they noticed any problems in the structure, they would have aborted the dive and reported back. There will probably have been no advance warning. But you can’t know that yet.
A quick death
What is certain is that the actual inflow of water and the collapse of the structure occurred in an instant. It’s like sitting in the living room and a 500-kilogram bomb explodes under the table. Such a “catastrophic event” happens within 20 milliseconds, Professor Eric Fusil of the University of Adelaide told ABC.
Navy officer Aileen Marty, a professor of disaster medicine, told CNN that the human brain cannot grasp the situation so quickly. “The whole thing collapsed before the people inside even realized there was a problem.” The occupants of the “Titan” died in a way they didn’t even know they were going to die. “Ultimately, given the many ways we can die, this is painless.”
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#Sinking #Titan #death #milliseconds #implosion